TY - JOUR A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Booysen, T. A1 - Stopforth, R. T1 - Why it is harder to run RoboCup in South Africa: Experiences from German South African collaborations JF - International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems N2 - Robots are widely used as a vehicle to spark interest in science and technology in learners. A number of initiatives focus on this issue, for instance, the Roberta Initiative, the FIRST Lego League, the World Robot Olympiad and RoboCup Junior. Robotic competitions are valuable not only for school learners but also for university students, as the RoboCup initiative shows. Besides technical skills, the students get some project exposure and experience what it means to finish their tasks on time. But qualifying students for future high-tech areas should not only be for students from developed countries. In this article, we present our experiences with research and education in robotics within the RoboCup initiative, in Germany and South Africa; we report on our experiences with trying to get the RoboCup initiative in South Africa going. RoboCup has a huge support base of academic institutions in Germany; this is not the case in South Africa. We present our ‘north–south’ collaboration initiatives in RoboCup between Germany and South Africa and discuss some of the reasons why we think it is harder to run RoboCup in South Africa. Y1 - 2016 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1729881416662789 SN - 1729-8806 VL - 13 IS - 5 SP - 1 EP - 13 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bartella, Alexander K. A1 - Kamal, Mohammad A1 - Scholl, Ingrid A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Steegmann, Julius A1 - Ketelsen, Dominik A1 - Hölzle, Frank W. A1 - Lethaus, Bernd T1 - Virtual reality in preoperative imaging in maxillofacial surgery: implementation of “the next level”? JF - British Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bjoms.2019.02.014 SN - 0266-4356 VL - 57 IS - 7 SP - 644 EP - 648 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Bharatheesha, Mukunda A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Corbato, Carlos Hernandez T1 - TRROS 2018 : Teaching Robotics with ROS Workshop at ERF 2018; Proceedings of the Workshop on Teaching Robotics with ROS (held at ERF 2018), co-located with European Robotics Forum 2018 (ERF 2018), Tampere, Finland, March 15th, 2018 T2 - CEUR Workshop Proceedings Y1 - 2019 SN - 1613-0073 IS - Vol-2329 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Goeckel, Tom A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Wagner, Hermann A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - The Video Conference Tool Robot ViCToR T2 - Intelligent Robotics and Applications : 8th International Conference, ICIRA 2015, Portsmouth, UK, August 24-27, 2015, Proceedings, Part II N2 - We present a robotic tool that autonomously follows a conversation to enable remote presence in video conferencing. When humans participate in a meeting with the help of video conferencing tools, it is crucial that they are able to follow the conversation both with acoustic and visual input. To this end, we design and implement a video conferencing tool robot that uses binaural sound source localization as its main source to autonomously orient towards the currently talking speaker. To increase robustness of the acoustic cue against noise we supplement the sound localization with a source detection stage. Also, we include a simple onset detector to retain fast response times. Since we only use two microphones, we are confronted with ambiguities on whether a source is in front or behind the device. We resolve these ambiguities with the help of face detection and additional moves. We tailor the system to our target scenarios in experiments with a four minute scripted conversation. In these experiments we evaluate the influence of different system settings on the responsiveness and accuracy of the device. Y1 - 2015 SN - 978-3-319-22876-1 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22876-1_6 N1 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science ; 9245 SP - 61 EP - 73 PB - Springer ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Limpert, Nicolas A1 - Wiesen, Patrick A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Kallweit, Stephan A1 - Schiffer, Stefan T1 - The ROSIN Project and its Outreach to South Africa JF - R&D Journal Y1 - 2019 VL - 35 SP - 1 EP - 6 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Kallweit, Stephan T1 - The ROSIN Education Concept - Fostering ROS Industrial-Related Robotics Education in Europe T2 - ROBOT 2017: Third Iberian Robotics Conference Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-3-319-70836-2 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70836-2_31 N1 - Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 694; (AISC, volume 694) SP - 370 EP - 381 PB - Springer CY - Cham ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Jacobs, Stefan A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Beck, Daniel T1 - Robust Collision Avoidance in Unknown Domestic Environments / Jacobs, Stefan ; Ferrein, Alexander ; Schiffer, Stefan ; Beck, Daniel ; Lakemeyer, Gerhard JF - ROBOCUP 2009: ROBOT SOCCER WORLD CUP XIII Y1 - 2009 N1 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science ; 5949 SP - 116 EP - 127 PB - Springer CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - Reasoning with Qualitative Positional Information for Domestic Domains in the Situation Calculus JF - Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems Y1 - 2011 SN - 0921-0296 VL - 63 IS - 2 SP - 273 EP - 300 PB - Springer CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - Qualitative World Models for Soccer Robots / Schiffer, Stefan ; Ferrein, Alexander ; Lakemeyer, Gerhard JF - Qualitative constraint calculi : application and integration ; KI 2006, 14 - 19 June 2006, Bremen, Germany ; 29th Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence ; workshop / Stefan Wölfl ... (eds.) Y1 - 2006 SN - 3-88722-666-6 SP - 3 EP - 14 PB - Univ. CY - Bremen ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications (ICIRA 2011) JF - Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications (ICIRA 2011) Y1 - 2010 SP - 1 EP - 10 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Alhwarin, Faraj A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Scholl, Ingrid T1 - Optimized KinectFusion Algorithm for 3D Scanning Applications T2 - Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - Volume 2: BIOIMAGING Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-989-758-278-3 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.5220/0006594700500057 SP - 50 EP - 57 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Nikolovski, Gjorgji A1 - Reke, Michael A1 - Elsen, Ingo A1 - Schiffer, Stefan T1 - Machine learning based 3D object detection for navigation in unstructured environments T2 - 2021 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium Workshops (IV Workshops) N2 - In this paper we investigate the use of deep neural networks for 3D object detection in uncommon, unstructured environments such as in an open-pit mine. While neural nets are frequently used for object detection in regular autonomous driving applications, more unusual driving scenarios aside street traffic pose additional challenges. For one, the collection of appropriate data sets to train the networks is an issue. For another, testing the performance of trained networks often requires tailored integration with the particular domain as well. While there exist different solutions for these problems in regular autonomous driving, there are only very few approaches that work for special domains just as well. We address both the challenges above in this work. First, we discuss two possible ways of acquiring data for training and evaluation. That is, we evaluate a semi-automated annotation of recorded LIDAR data and we examine synthetic data generation. Using these datasets we train and test different deep neural network for the task of object detection. Second, we propose a possible integration of a ROS2 detector module for an autonomous driving platform. Finally, we present the performance of three state-of-the-art deep neural networks in the domain of 3D object detection on a synthetic dataset and a smaller one containing a characteristic object from an open-pit mine. KW - 3D object detection KW - LiDAR KW - autonomous driving KW - Deep learning KW - Three-dimensional displays Y1 - 2021 SN - 978-1-6654-7921-9 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/IVWorkshops54471.2021.9669218 N1 - 2021 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium Workshops (IV Workshops), 11-17 July 2021, Nagoya, Japan. SP - 236 EP - 242 PB - IEEE ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Niemüller, Tim A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard ED - Boots, Byron T1 - Lessons learnt from developing the embodied AI platform CAESAR for domestic service robotics T2 - Designing intelligent robots : reintegrating AI II ; papers from the AAAI spring symposium ; [held March 25 - 27, 2013 in Palo Alto, California, USA, on the campus of Stanford University]. (Technical Report / Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence ; 2013,4) Y1 - 2013 SN - 9781577356011 SP - 21 EP - 26 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Kirsch, Maximilian A1 - Mataré, Victor A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Schiffer, Stefan T1 - Integrating golog++ and ROS for Practical and Portable High-level Control T2 - 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence Y1 - 2020 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.5220/0008984406920699 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Mataré, Victor A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander ED - Steinbauer, Gerald ED - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - golog++ : An integrative system design T2 - CogRob 2018. Cognitive Robotics Workshop : Proceedings of the 11th Cognitive Robotics Workshop 2018 co-located with 16th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2018) Tempe, AZ, USA, October 27th, 2018 Y1 - 2019 SN - 1613-0073 SP - 29 EP - 35 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - Fuzzy representations and control for domestic service robots in Golog T2 - Intelligent robotics and applications : 4th International conference, ICIRA 2011, Aachen, Germany, December 6-8, 2011, proceedings, part I. (Lecture notes in computer science ; 7102) Y1 - 2011 SN - 978-3-642-25486-4 SP - 241 EP - 250 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - Football is coming Home / Schiffer, Stefan ; Ferrein, Alexander ; Lakemeyer, Gerhard JF - PCAR '06 Proceedings of the 2006 international symposium on Practical cognitive agents and robots Y1 - 2006 SN - 1-74052-130-7 SP - 39 EP - 50 PB - ACM CY - New York, NY ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - ERIKA—Early Robotics Introduction at Kindergarten Age JF - Multimodal Technologies Interact N2 - In this work, we report on our attempt to design and implement an early introduction to basic robotics principles for children at kindergarten age. One of the main challenges of this effort is to explain complex robotics contents in a way that pre-school children could follow the basic principles and ideas using examples from their world of experience. What sets apart our effort from other work is that part of the lecturing is actually done by a robot itself and that a quiz at the end of the lesson is done using robots as well. The humanoid robot Pepper from Softbank, which is a great platform for human–robot interaction experiments, was used to present a lecture on robotics by reading out the contents to the children making use of its speech synthesis capability. A quiz in a Runaround-game-show style after the lecture activated the children to recap the contents they acquired about how mobile robots work in principle. In this quiz, two LEGO Mindstorm EV3 robots were used to implement a strongly interactive scenario. Besides the thrill of being exposed to a mobile robot that would also react to the children, they were very excited and at the same time very concentrated. We got very positive feedback from the children as well as from their educators. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of only few attempts to use a robot like Pepper not as a tele-teaching tool, but as the teacher itself in order to engage pre-school children with complex robotics contents. Y1 - 2018 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mti2040064 SN - 2414-4088 VL - 2 IS - 4 PB - MDPI CY - Basel ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - Embedding fuzzy controllers in golog / Ferrein, Alexander ; Schiffer, Stefan ; Lakemeyer, Gerhard JF - IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems, 2009. FUZZ-IEEE 2009 Y1 - 2009 SN - 978-1-4244-3596-8 SP - 894 EP - 899 PB - IEEE CY - New York ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Scholl, Ingrid A1 - Suder, Sebastian A1 - Schiffer, Stefan T1 - Direct Volume Rendering in Virtual Reality T2 - Bildverarbeitung für die Medizin 2018 Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-3-662-56537-7 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-56537-7_79 SP - 297 EP - 302 PB - Springer Vieweg CY - Berlin ER -